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Everything has been worth it.

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binary star

the birth of you, the death of Me—

you quelled my singularity

tenfold my heat (or so i thought)

a brighter star. you cast your lot

with luck; in our young binary

you were my system’s Primary.

my body swerved to serve, alone,

a white queen on a cosmic throne

(while others, lenses pointed high

condemned the motions of the sky:

small central mass. we would not last.)

Love truly is a parallax.

—We clung to shadows; eschewed fact:

No fleeting, fragmentary bliss

Could conquer my impassiveness.

The grandeur of celestial dance

Collapsed under our fraught romance

(And while your body craved my kiss

My hold on you became stasis.)

And now your absence leaves a throne

For me, the queen of the alone.

The salve to my dependency:

The death of you. 

The birth of Me.

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Amazon College Care Package

In light of the Great and Terrible Revelation to come this Thursday, I’ve decided to splurge on products that will ease my troubled mind. Let’s hope that Amazon shipping does me some favors here. 

• The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. A real mood-lifter, that one. Maybe reading about Sylvia Plath’s internal turmoil can help quell some of mine. I always did have an uncanny knack for finding angsty Plath poems relevant to my situation, namely those having to do with implausible and failed romantic relationships. (With that being said, I doubt Plath wrote any poetry about the college admissions process. Maybe Lauren can go sift through the Smith archives for me and check.)
• Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov. Here’s a confession: for all my love of deliciously illicit and twisted relationships, I haven’t actually managed to finish this novel before. I figure that a rejection letter coupled with a few hours of Lolita will set me on the course to fun-filled depravity. It’ll be a coping mechanism.
• The Collective by Don Lee. I find myself questioning how a novel about a fraught Asian-American artist collective could possibly help me get over my thwarted future ambitions. Then again, I should probably ask myself how Plath poems and Lolita are going to do me any favors. If anything, this book will replace my self-pity with indignant Taiwanese-American fury. Always a fun prospect.
• Sansa Zip-Clip Player. After inadvertently putting my old mp3 player through the wringer, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to get another one. I need suggestions for a coping playlist. 

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textbook—enigmatic:

iridelis replied to your post: omggg there was this really attractive college…

WHAT I SUPERVISED THE WRONG SHIFT UGHHH

YES

YOU DID

AND GOD SHE WAS SO ATTRACTIVE

AND SHE WORE GLASSES

I AM A SUCKER FOR GLASSES

SLKFJLKSDJF ♥

maybe it’s better that I didn’t attend; I would’ve disintegrated into a blubbering mess of incoherent feels

“are you sure you want me to wrap these books because your body is the real present daaaaayum gurl”

I am glad to hear that you had a good time.

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Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps

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Final Countdown

Unfortunately for me, my Early Decision notification from Williams comes the night before my Calculus final. I was anticipating a Saturday evening countdown with fellow students who had applied to the likes of Harvard, Yale, and Claremont McKenna - but, as Fate and the sadistic whims of zealous college admissions officers would have it, it looks like I’m going it alone.

Either I’ll spend Thursday evening too ecstatic to take my responsibilities seriously or too grief-stricken to deal with necessary activities, among them legitimately studying for said Calculus final. Needless to say: when it comes to Purple Cows, I’d really much rather be than see one at this point. 

(Fortunately, a fair amount of lurking on the Williams tumblr tag has allowed me to find a few fellow applicants. Maybe the lack of people freaking out on the tag is an indication of how sophisticated and worry-free this year’s applicant pool is. I think I’m just grappling at straws to justify my anxiety at this point. Please excuse me. kdFJS:LDJFLKDJF:)

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soyonscruels:

I am Ophelia. The one the river didn’t keep. The woman dangling from the rope. The women with her arteries cut open. The woman with the overdose. SNOW ON HER LIPS. The woman with her head in the gas stove. Yesterday I stopped killing myself. I’m alone with my breasts my thighs my womb. I smash the tools of my captivity, the chair the table the bed. I destroy the battlefield that was my home. I fling open the doors so the wind gets in and the scream of the world. I smash the window. With my bleeding hands I tear the photos of the men I loved and who tied me on the bed on the table on the chair on the ground. I set fire to my prison. I throw my clothes into the fire. I wrench the clock that was my heart out of my breast. I walk into the street clothed in my blood.

—Hamletmachine, Heiner Muller

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Regression

Objectively speaking, I haven’t made any ostentatiously bad choices. But I’m ashamed of myself. I feel as if somewhere along the line, I made a terrible call - placed ego over passion, the intellectual expectations of others over genuine personal desires - and whatever “talent” and “insight” I used to possess is all gone, irrecoverable, pruned from the circuitry of an exhausted one-track mind.

I haven’t written anything new in months, after all. The thought of my passion festering does sickens me, but I can’t help it; I can’t even defend my creative ambitions with the same conviction I possessed so strongly before. I entertain fleeting notions of pursuing some other careers I might be interested in: virology, anthropology, marine biology - and then I feel some abject sense of betrayal, a feeling of hypocrisy for daring to turn my back on English. How could I abandon a career interest I struggled to defend for years? But now my dreams seem less like a genuine passion and more like a mission statement I’ve conditioned myself to tell others out of sheer force of habit: Hello. My name is Ariel. I want to be an editor?

I guess all the catalyst for this angst was the realization that I truly have regressed. A few days ago, I ventured upon some stories I wrote when I was thirteen. In terms of mechanics, they definitely weren’t as great as my work is now - for all my alleged love for semicolons, I had a swell time using them incorrectly - but they had so much vibrancy and creativity to them, a sense of exploration and curiosity that my writing today lacks. I find myself wondering how I used to have the kind of intellectual vitality to be able to come up with such unpredictable plotlines. Maybe I didn’t particularly care for being right back then; maybe I just wrote random crap for the hell of it and in retrospect, it turned out better than I expected. But whatever the case, my writing then held some degree of passion and personal motivation and, I don’t know, conviction?

I can’t do that anymore, and it scares me so much.

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